A new musical The Dismissal retells the sacking of Prime Minister Gough Whitlam by the Governor-General Sir John Kerr through the eyes of the hapless, hilarious reporter, as best he can remember it.
The Norman Gunston Show debuted on the ABC in May 1975, and Gunston, played by actor Garry McDonald, was in Canberra the day the dismissal happened
With his bad comb over and bleeding shaving cuts, Gunston pointed his microphone at Bob Hawke, who was then ACTU president and national president of the ALP.
"It's a bit too serious for that," Hawke tells him.
"I quite agree, it certainly is serious, it's extremely serious," Gunston replied.
McDonald as Gunston even managed to address a crowd of hundreds outside Parliament House on November 11, 1975.
"Is this an affront to the constitution of this country?" he asked, before mispronouncing the name of one of the key players.
"Or is it just a stroke of good luck for Mr Frasier?"
Writers Blake Erickson and Jay James-Moody have made these defining political events into an "extremely serious musical comedy", billed as Australia's answer to Hamilton.
"It's incredibly funny, but we think that ultimately it makes quite a serious point about asking Australians to consider the kind of country that we are, and perhaps the kind of country that we want to be," Erikson told AAP.
The show is not only a retelling of events but ranges through almost a century both before and after the dismissal, and there's even a scene set in Buckingham Palace.
Matthew Whittet plays Norman Gunston, Justin Smith stars as Gough Whitlam, Andrew Cutcliffe as Malcolm Fraser, and Octavia Barron Martin as Sir John Kerr.
Developing these characters was a way of not only making what happened more relatable, but a device to shed light on Australia's national identity.
How long did it take to put the musical together? Erickson measures this in prime ministers, and since the start of the project in 2018, Australia has been through three of them.
The production team had been prepared for the show to become dated or irrelevant as they were writing it, but instead they found the opposite.
There were many moments of contemporary relevance, Erikson said, because Australian political system is stuck in a loop.
"It's extraordinary, it seems like every moment is the perfect moment for The Dismissal," he said, joking that maybe, just maybe, the show itself could be a circuit breaker.
The conditions that facilitated the constitutional crisis are still in place almost 50 years later, and there's nothing other than convention to stop it happening again.
And if the response to previews is anything to go by, the events of 1975 are still very much a live debate, according to Erikson.
"There are people who are still thrashing this out on Facebook as if it happened yesterday."
* The Dismissal opens at the Seymour Centre in Sydney on Saturday.
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